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Susan SmithSusan Smith has worked as an editor and writer in the technology industry for over 16 years. As an editor she has been responsible for the launch of a number of technology trade publications, both in print and online. Currently, Susan is the Editor of GISCafe and AECCafe, as well as those sites’ newsletters and blogs. She writes on a number of topics, including but not limited to geospatial, architecture, engineering and construction. As many technologies evolve and occasionally merge, Susan finds herself uniquely situated to be able to cover diverse topics with facility. « Less

Susan SmithSusan Smith has worked as an editor and writer in the technology industry for over 16 years. As an editor she has been responsible for the launch of a number of technology trade publications, both in print and online. Currently, Susan is the Editor of GISCafe and AECCafe, as well as those sites’ … More »

Intergraph 2013 Geospatial Portfolio focuses on entire lifecycle

Mladen Stojic, vice president of Geospatial at Intergraph, presented at a virtual press event this week to announce the Intergraph 2013 Geospatial Portfolio.

“We have simultaneously released a complete and united portfolio of GIS and remote sensing for the desktop the server to deliver large GIS to users inside and outside organizations,” said Stojic. “Many of our customers have to rely on three-five different vendors to do their job. Hexagon (Intergraph’s parent company) began in 2005 with the acquisition of Leica and then Intergraph in 2010, with a focus on fulfilling the complete geospatial lifecycle. This release came to fruition with that vision in mind. We released on December 10th 64 different products in various GIS genres and photogrammetry for both desktop and server. We have someone working on geospatial products 24 hours a day given our global reach, with a very strong team.”

Stojic said, “There are three things we try to promote – united, as we now have a united portfolio of GIS and remote sensing that is streamlined; modern – in this day and age of tablets, with modernized look and feel required, we’ve modernized our approach to how products can and should be used. This is driven by delivering GeoMedia 2013; dynamic – the earth is constantly changing. With the sensors from Leica we can capture and transform content that can be delivered on demand through new spatial modeling capabilities and point cloud tools to give more information.”

Intergraph prior to acquisition by Hexagon has always been a very traditional company, with deep roots in the GIS/geospatial industry and defense/military. Modernizing its image and approach to technology has seemed a long time in coming. The same issues that beset other vendors of geospatial products – sustainable development, natural resources, urbanization, natural disasters, security, aging infrastructure – are the challenges that Intergraph embraces with this new 2013 release.

This release focuses on the geographic information lifecycle embodying surveying, photogrammetry, remote sensing, GIS, and servers into one geospatial portfolio. With SGI, Intergraph has the ability to deliver and deploy solutions for government, transportation, utilities, communication, defense and intelligence, public safety and much more. The new release heralds a better way to deploy geospatial solutions and help solve the problems many organizations have of having to work with different GIS vendors.

Vince Smith, Global Product Line executive for GIS, talked about this new approach by discussing the GeoMedia desktop product family. “GIS at Intergraph accesses data from different data sources, i.e., engineering drawing, shape data, Oracle, SQL Server, open format, etc. and brings them into a single view,” said Smith. “Everything’s aligned inside the GeoMedia map window, and you can perform complex analysis across all data sources, using GeoMedia’s style system, convey information to others, do layout environments, add ancillary or other annotations to it. GeoMedia is our flagship vector GIS product family.”

Modern GeoMedia is about ten years old and had a classic menu structure. Now it has a ribbon interface that is already part of ERDAS IMAGINE, Intergraph’s remote sensing product.

Some of the capabilities that come with this tab interface, include: reorganized different commands, context sensitivity as you highlight certain types of data, “my workflow” tab where can actually go in and add individual commands.

The “united” theme refers in this product to the integration of GeoMedia and ERDAS Apollo. The GeoMedia desktop can now access Apollo Server and get image data that to bring back to the client.

With “dynamic” GeoMedia Intergraph has upgraded labeling capabilities within the product, to bring better dynamic labeling based on rules you set up for labeling and can edit labels inside GeoMedia.

It is possible to access a large amount of data in GeoMedia with the right architecting for software, with the implementation client side caching scheme, and increased performance. You can determine when the cache can be turned on and off. Cache files exist for each of those different data sources.

Steve du Plessis, Product Line executive for Remote Sensing said that ERDAS IMAGINE allows users to get data from satellites and photogrammetry. The company has a whole suite of lidar and point cloud processing capabilities.